Bottomland: Based on the Murder of Rosa Mary Dean in Franklin, Tennessee

by Trey Holt

  Now there’s no blood; just a dead body. As lifeless as an old tire fished from the bottom of the river. And now she’s stiff as a goddam board. The way I imagined her to be when I let myself look at her in the coffin at Franklin Memorial Chapel. I roll her off me and she hits the floor hard, cracking so loud I’m afraid it’s awakened Mama and Lucky.

  And now I’m carrying her. She’s lighter than I imagined. Her dark hair is falling around my face as I try to push it away from me as I run. She slips a few times, as I try to pull her up onto my shoulder higher. She’s laying over my shoulder, her breasts just on the other side. Her arms dangle down my back. I can feel them bounce up and down as I run down West Main Street. In the distance, I see the Chapel, people pouring out of the Zion Room, stone-faced. I want to stop, to go back and see who’s there this time. But I can’t stop running; even though she’s become heavy as hell, I can’t stop. My shoulder’s the weariest thing about me. It burns like somebody’s stuck a hot poker to it. I finally can go no more. I stop and lay her down on the sidewalk; they’re a quarter mile down West Main. I think to myself that I have at least a minute, maybe ninety seconds, the way they’re coming.

  From the distance I am, I can see that Jimmy Langford is leading the pack. Paul Chester and John Harvey are behind him. Sammy Samuels behind them, with that characteristic smile on his face, one that Lucky calls“a shit-eatin’grin.” They’ve all got bats or guns. They’re grumbling among themselves.

  “You know that little bastard had somethin’to do with it,”Jimmy Langford tells them.

  Now I can’t pick her up. She weighs three hundred pounds again. I start to try to drag her down the sidewalk.

  “I used to trust the little motherfucker,”says goddam Sammy.“I trusted him when he was playing football. He could run with a fuckin’football, couldn’t he? That was before he turned pussy, wasn’t it? Hey, Jimmy?” he says.

  Still coming, now an eighth of a mile away, Jimmy Langford says,“Yeah?”

  “Ain’t that a goddam shame, how your boy gave up his football playin’career to go defend his country…and then you got this kid. I don’t even know what to say or think about somebody like him.”

  “I tell ya what you can say,”says John Harvey.“You can say that he’s a fuckin’quitter…and he’s a murderer. He’s been fuckin’that poor little ole white trash Bishop girl up there behind Franklin High School ever since Van Manor got through fuckin’her. Who the hell else would have dumped that damn body there? He’s probably like his daddy…not the sharpest knife in the drawer and given to fits of rage. Lose his head; not know ten minutes later what he did and what he didn’t do.”

  As I’m still struggling to get her up, I begin to try to explain it to them, at the same time, surprised I’m an apologist for Lucky.“He didn’t do that this mornin’. Didn’t you bunch’a assholes see him? Jimmy Langford, you’re lucky he didn’t whip your ass. I’ve seen him whip the ass of bigger men than you. With one fuckin’punch from one of those short, ham hock arms.

  “There he is!” yells Paul Chester.“He’s been cheatin’for years. He and that goddam Manor. They’re two of a kind. They both been cheatin’ever since the Academy let‘em in. Cheatin’and stealin’cigarettes out of my store. Somehow they talked my boy into gettin’ ‘em for‘em. Prob’ly just like they talked him into cheatin’.”

  “I don’t reckon anybody had to talk little Pauley into doin’anything bad,”says Sammy to John Harvey. Paul Chester and Jimmy Langford don’t hear him. I do as I’m struggling to get her on my shoulders again and run.

  But now she’s gone. Into thin air. I turn and look behind me to see her rising into the early morning sky. The darkness has suddenly given itself over to daylight. She smiles and waves at me like she forgives me for all I’ve done to her. I’m relieved to see her without that fucking gash at her throat. Or really four gashes that George Preston was able to merge together with make-up to look more like one sewn shut. Her clothes are new now. No more riding pants. No cheap coat with fake fur around the collar. She has on a nice skirt, a sweater, hose and high heels. I gasp for breath because she’s dressed like Sharon. But before I can think more about it, I can hear them getting closer.

  “There he is!”screams Sammy Samuels.“He’s right there. We’re right on top of him. He’s waitin’on us. Get him!”

  As they move their last hundred feet toward me, like I’m in a completely different time and circumstance, I turn to see where Arliss is, knowing now that they are chasing him. I can feel my heart jack-hammering so hard in my chest I think my ribs might break. When they’re close enough that I can hear their feet moving across the pavement of the sidewalk, I extend my hands reflex-like to protect myself.

  Both my hands are black. I pull at the collar on my shirt; my chest is black, the few hairs on it, dark, short and kinky. With Paul Chester a dozen feet away from me, I turn and begin to try to run. Knowing they’ll surely kill me if they catch me, I imagine that they’ll string me up from a tree out in the county somewhere, like’s probably been done many times before. A bunch of proud white assholes posing for a picture like they’ve been hunting. I’ve seen things like that, I’m sorry to say, come from my state and the ones that surround it.

  I’m trying to get up speed like when I used to return kickoffs, hit the best stride right before you fall in behind the wedge, so it takes more than slight contact to bring or slow you down. I try to push my legs harder, but I can’t because I can’t breathe. Can’t suck in enough air to get my body to work right.

  I feel Paul Chester’s hand on my back then my shoulder as he takes a good grasp and then starts to bring me to the concrete. I feel the warmth of the other men as they converge on the prey Paul Chester has brought down.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Goddam!” I gasped, trying to fight his hands away from me. I couldn’t breathe, the air full of lumps as I tried to draw it past the profanity. Before I knew it I was swinging—flailing, I guess, is more like it—and my hands were striking his hands, his chest, his face. He was squinting, reaching for my hands as they tried to fight him off. Grimacing, each time one of my hands would make contact.

  I looked into Lucky’s face, for the first time in I couldn’t tell you when. His eyes were green, and they were tired, pulled down at the corners. Sad maybe. His smell finally touched me. He reeked of cigarettes and whiskey and work. His tee shirt, like mine, was drenched with his own sweat. His chest still rose and fell hard from his ascension of the stairs to the attic. He stood and propped himself on a desk I sometimes did my homework on back when I did it, his hands on its top, holding his torso almost upright.

  “I got Don Walton down at the jail, spending the night tonight. Him and Lucas Reasonover.”

  “Don Walton back in town?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. He come back,”he said.“I had to call him at his mama’s in Paducah…get him to drive back. I need all the men I can get, I guess.”

  “Anybody say anything about knowing that woman?” I asked him.

  “Not one goddam word,”he told me.“You believe that? As many people as was there.” He laughed. Sad and resolute.

  “How many people you think came?”

  He lit a Lucky. Surprisingly, offered me one. Lit it once I took it from his hand.

  “From the looks of that register George Preston had out, quite a few hundred. And I’m damn sure a lot of them didn’t sign it. A’course, everybody there was there for the good of the commun’ty.”

  “Sure,”I told him.

  He sat quietly for a few moments, staring off into the darkness out the same window Percy used to look. One eye mostly closed, contorting his face in a way he did when he was thinking hard about something.

  “Had to fire a fuckin’warnin’shot at goddam Jimmy Langford tonight,”he told me.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I fired it right into Sammy Samuels’grill.”

  “Of that new Ford?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s a coupl’a ye
ars old,”he said.“But yeah, that’s the one.”

  I nodded. Drew deep on the cigarette, like he was doing.“What’d he do?”

  “He set there for a minute, I think, considerin’whether or not to pull that pistol I know he carries from under the seat while his headlights shined in my eyes. I couldn’t see‘em good, but I knew who they were. Jimmy Langford was the only one crazy enough to stick his head out of the car. Crazy bastard. He hit me in the head with a pistol this mornin’.” He reached up, patted his head with the flat of his hand.“He was yellin’out the winda’that this time he had a shotgun. He’d shoot me and the whole goddam Mosby family if he had to.”

  I was just coming back to the time and place in which we sat, rubbing sleep and confusion from my eyes. Just realizing that this, too, wasn’t a part of that godforsaken dream I’d been having half the night.

  “Just about the time the day started to turn gray, Miss Helen called me and said Mrs. Mosby had got out of her house and got to somebody’s house with a phone and called. The fuckin’cowards was outside their house, hollerin’.” For a brief moment, he stared into me like I might have the answer to some burning question he couldn’t articulate.“I prob’ly shouldn’t call‘em that. I guess they’re just scared like everybody else. People want answers…want them answers to be the sure thing. If they’re not, then I think alot’a times we do what it takes in our mind to make‘em that way. Like Percy and the goddam graveyard. Or Percy and them women. Some things just never come clear as a cloudless sky. Most things, I guess.”

  It was the first time I could remember Lucky, or anybody else in our house for that matter, mentioning Percy since the late days of summer had given way to early fall. It had not only been just like he disappeared—but like he had never been there in the first place. I started to acknowledge the fact that he had mentioned his own brother’s name. But I was afraid it would cause him to never do it again. The mere mention of his name had been comforting, soothed something in me that stupid dream had only made more raw.

  “So, did they want Arliss?”

  “Yeah…and I guess they were gonna take him, too. I was hopin’at first that they was there just to scare him. But I think if I hadn’t took him in myself, then they would’a hurt him. Prob’ly killed him. Anyway…I never give‘em a chance to get him. Miss Helen said when Mrs. Mosby called her she was cryin’and gaspin’for breath, sayin’that them men had been yellin’for that‘little murderin’nigger’to come on out or they was gonna come in there and get‘im.”

  I imagined Lucky holed up in his squad car under our carport, nursing one of the three or four bottles he kept different places. Getting the call from Miss Helen. Cussing a blue streak because he had to re-enter the world…do his job.

  “When I first come out with him, they was yellin’all kinds a things at me. Nigger Lover. That George Preston and me was queer…had been suckin’each other’s dick over at the funeral home. But there just stayed this strange calmness about me. Kind’a like the situation with Jimmy Langford this mornin’. Doin’nothin’but lookin’at‘em like they was idiots seemed to be thebest thing in the world to do. But then they got between me and my car as I took Arliss back up the side’a the road. That was a mistake, I guess, leavin’the car up the road. No matter…they said they wasn’t gonna let me get to the car with him. That if I did, then I’d just take Arliss down there and store him like I had that other nigger, his daddy.

  “Even though I couldn’t see‘em, I asked every one of‘em by name to get out’a the way. But it didn’t make no difference—they had made up their mind that they was gonna be the heroes a’the town. They was gonna keep workin’things up until somebody got a wild hair up his ass to fire a shot. After I’d tried five different ways to get around the goddam Ford, I finally just pulled out my pistol and let off a round into the grill.”

  “What’d they do?” I asked him.

  “Jimmy Langford had that shotgun sighted on me, I could see that much. Me or Arliss. But the rest of‘em didn’t do anythin’but sit there. Sit there and look like I did when I fell on my ass on the front porch a’the funeral home.”

  + + +

  When Sharon's daddy and sister died was one of the few times that I would go into that house. Or the shack, as Van the asshole called it. I'd usually make it only inside the door, or maybe halfway through the front room, which was the living room, when somebody would intercept me. Sharon’s mother, Ima, or Bootlegger Bobby when he was there. Or one of Edward's kids from his first marriage, most of them as old as Ima herself, come to help her because she still hadn't recovered from the loss, the travesty fate had heaped on her. Goddam Randomness.

  I always figured it was the house they were trying to keep me from seeing. I don't think Sharon ever got over what she came from, or what people like Van the Man, as he liked to call himself, said about it. That's why she dressed and talked like she did, I imagined, to prove to people she wasn't from exactly where she, in fact, was from. The“mixed”section of town. That's why she put on the nice clothes she'd bought on her employee discount from Castner Knott, drove to the nice area of Nashville to work every day.

  No self-respecting white man or woman wanted to live there.The few square blocks that constituted this area were in fact for the poorest of the white people. White people, in essence, who had no more power than black people, except for the little that came from being white. Many people, including Sammy Samuels and Jimmy Langford (who they had called Little Nigger in school because of the dark color of his skin, and where he lived), had spent their younger days there, making it the goal of their lives to transcend the area. Rise from it like smoke and fade colorless into the sky. Fly away. In particular, their journeys had taken them only a few blocks, maybe four or five, to a section of town about that far away from where we lived.Far enough, though, that they could claim they no longer lived in the“mixed section.”

  After the Depression had flushed people from their farms and then the prosperity and spirit of World War II had built them brick homes in subdivisions, the section itself had become more and more black, except for the“White Trash,”an expression I heard the first time from Jean. Only the white people who had no means to leave had stayed.

  + + +

  The house next door to the Bishops had been empty since the white people who could had begun to flee the“mixed section,”and the Samuels family had finally moved to the house where they lived after Sammy's idea of auctioning dead people's things took off. Pretty much just like the house that the Bishop's lived in, a little frame dwelling, small enough, as Van had said, that you could spit from the front door to the back door, John Harvey had refused to rent it to a black family and no white family wanted it. Believing that if somebody didn't take a stand then the“colored”people were going to take over the town, he had told Lucky he would refuse to rent the house at all. And it sat as empty as most of the neighbors' pockets.

  It was useful at times, though. Bobby Bishop now sold bootleg whisky out of it. He'd just taken to doing this, Tully had told me, since he had turned eighteen, decided not to go back for his third trip through the tenth grade and left his mother’s house. Running moonshine up from Peytonsville (better known as Little Texas) or even Alabama, and giving an alternative to Paul Chester and the four or five beer joints between Franklin and Brentwood and the one or two other people who sold it in town, was a lucrative thing to do, Tully had explained it to me. And nobody, including Lucky, really policed that part of town. Hell, that's where he should have gotten the shine rather than the stuff that nearly killed me. It should have been—from Bootlegger Bobby, he called him. He was thinking about setting a still up in the back of the house, Tully had gone on, because old man Harvey never checked on it. Was just gonna let the son of a bitch fall down before he'd rent it to a black family.

  “Really, though,”Sharon explained to me,“he's not a bootlegger. He just got mixed up with some of those guys down there in Little Texas. That's where his daddy was originally from and
he's always gone down there since he was old enough to walk by himself. I'm not sure how much his daddy would ever have to do with him, but I guess he did make a lot of other friends down there. Older men who felt sorry for him. That's why Mama told him in the fall that she wasn't letting him live there anymore. I guess we're just as well off. He really didn't do anything anyway except give us a little money every now and then. He still stays at our house half the time, though.”

  She moved around a little. Tried to find a more comfortable position. Arranged the blanket under us some. The night was as dark as coal around us, the walls blending into the windows, even where light was supposed to come through. The old wall paper, a muted print, bled into the ceiling, having lost its whiteness over the years. The wood floor, cold under us as we lay there, felt almost icy to the touch. We had lay there long enough that I thought my eyes would have adjusted, my pupils dilated enough that I could make out one color from another. Everything, though, was colorless. The darkness bleeding color from itself, stripping it of its essence.

  “Are you cold?” I asked her. I pulled the blanket high enough that only my nose and forehead were uncovered.

  “Oh…a little,”she told me.“But I bet you're colder. The girl's supposed to be colder.”

  “Well, in this case, it ain't true,”I told her. I pulled her body as close to mine as I could get it. The place smelled of empty house, whatever thatis. The smell of memory, of happenings with a voice no longer. She smelled like she always did. Somewhere between that perfume she bought at the department store and just clean.